The original purpose of meta refresh tags was exactly what you're referring to. A pageneeded to be updated or the info on it wasno longer relevant but for some reason you did'nt want to delete the page maybe becauseyou had a use for it in the future. However, forsome reason Infoseeks' bots seems to rank a refresh page higher than a page without. (I have been baffled by this for a long time).However once knowledgable spammer figured thisout, it very quickly became so that at least about 50% of the top 20 under any popular keywordwas a meta refresh.

The main purpose for a meta refresh now it to present the search engine bot with a differentpage than you present to the searcher. Infoseekhas taken such a hard line policy against metarefresh tags that they will penalize the page,ban you domain from the instant add url feature(which BTW isn't very &^&*%$&(* instant thesedats) and even pull all the pages from that domain from their index. Of course that's if you get caught(and you will because your competitorswill just re-submit your site for you and keepdoing it until they pull the page) Alta Vistacan do the same thing and so will Excite(I haven'theard of Excite banning you from submittingbut they will pull all your pages from the index.)

I'm not only passing along what I've heard from other clients and friends, I'm also speakingfrom experience. I do NOT use meta refresh tagsany longer. I strongly urge you to find anotherway around your problem as well. Getting bustedis VERY expensive!